The present invention relates to the assembling of furniture, in particular to the assembling of planar furniture elements oriented at right angles to one another, such as the side walls, the front wall, and the back wall of a drawer.
When a piece of furniture is composed of mechanically joined furniture elements, the furniture elements are often structurally weaker at the joints, at which they may break when the piece of furniture is subjected to loads. This is particularly the case when the furniture elements are manufactured of softer materials, such as particle board, and joined by traditional joints, such as but joints, lap joints, and traditional tongue and groove joints. This problem is particularly pronounced provided the piece of furniture is shipped in non-assembled state, i.e. as individual or separate components such as plate or wall components to be assembled by the consumer. Further, when disassembling a piece of furniture the structure of the individual furniture elements may be damaged, e.g. when removing plugs or nails. This may reduce the structural strength of the piece of furniture as a whole after being assembled again. It is therefore an object of the present invention to improve the structural strength of a piece of furniture that is composed of several furniture elements. If tools are used to assemble a piece of furniture from several furniture elements, this may cause damage to the structure of the furniture elements. For example, the thread of a screw may cause damage if driven too far into the structure of a furniture element. This typically occurs if an electrical screwdriver is used at the wrong torque setting. It is therefore an additional object of the present invention to enable an assembling that does not require tools.
From U.S. Pat. No. 1,468,786, a drawer is known, which is composed of a front member, two side members, a rear end member and a bottom, which are all joint together in conventional dove tail joints.